Thursday, April 17, 2014

Why We Need Resolve (And Goodbye Vengeance)

Sorry about the lack of posting. Crazy busy in real life, working on a NWNmodule, and trying to build up my guild to Mythic. We've been 14/14H for a while now on just two nights a week (raid Sun/Mon from 7:30 to 11:30-12:00 CST) so if that interests you we'd love to see you apply. Planning on switching to 25 man in a month or two in preparation.

Given all that, I'm going to highlight some comments I posted elsewhere since it's a question I've seen more than once, most prominently at Blessing of Kings:

Rohan wrote...

However, as I understand it, Resolve means that a tank who is not taking damage is squishier than a tank who is taking damage.

But if the tank is not taking damage, does it really matter that she is squishier?

Or to put it another way, there's an equation that should balance in a successful fight:

Why not just remove the Resolve term? You could directly boost the self
healing/mitigation or lower the incoming damage, and the equation would
still balance. Removing Resolve would simplify things, and not create
weird situations like a successful parry/dodge streak that causes
Resolve to drop off.

It's an interesting question -- but the answer lies in the active mitigation category.

But now imagine the boss has an
special attack which applies a debuff that makes the next special attack
do more (like a breath that deals fire damage and increases fire damage
taken by 100%) and this fires every 10 seconds and the debuff lasts 30
seconds.

So you'd swap every 3 stacks, right?

Nope!
Because you could use Shield Barrier to reduce that hit which should
deal like twice your HP down to 20% of your HP. Even an attack which
hit you for eight times your maximum health could be reduced to 80% hit
-- which would be a hell of a lot of stacks. In fact, you'd never need
to swap. Any hard hit of damage which occurs less often than you can
Shield Barrier is irrelevant.

So let's go to the reverse and say we go to flat absorbs. How would that even work for Shield Block?

Absorb
a flat amount per second? Then that's less effective against slow
attacking bosses which might only hit every 2 seconds and more effective
versus fast attacks.

Absorb a flat amount per hit? Then that's less effective against hard hitting bosses and more effective against fast attacks.

Absorb a flat amount? Then that's Shield Barrier.

The
best case scenario would be something like using Shield Block builds an
absorb shell every second that stacks with itself -- which would mean
it becomes TOO powerful if you happen to dodge/parry a few attacks
because then it applies that absorption to a single attack.

So
then you'd have to do stuff like remove the absorb on a dodge or parry
-- except then what if you parry a weak add's attack and then eat a hard
boss hit to the face?

Then on top of that you have stuff like Savage Defense which gives a Dodge increase so that's a whole new bag of worms.

Or...

...we could just make Shield Barrier absorb more against harder hitting mobs so it stays roughly equal to Shield Block.

The
main idea, actually, is that Shield Block is better at mitigating
overall damage but Shield Barrier can be used to deal with known spike
damage or in case your HP dips low. It's meant to be a tradeoff.

TL;DR version: tanks typically have one active mitigation that reduces damage by a percent and another that heals or absorbs a flat amount of damage and Resolve is needed to keep these at roughly equal power. The heal/absorb still mitigates LESS overall but it's used to mitigate spikes of damage which are dangerous.